Mary Riddell is a columnist and a political interviewer for the Daily Telegraph. She writes on topics ranging from family to foreign policy and is particularly interested in criminal justice. Her focus is what is going on, for better or for worse, in the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Blame the gagging judges, not the Human Rights Act

Mr Justice Eady has surpassed himself. In granting a restraining order contra mundum to an actor who allegedly paid a prostitute, the gagging judge has dealt a heavy blow against human rights.

David Cameron's expressions of unease about this ruling are wholly justified. The latest and most blatant concession to those who can afford to buy their privacy through the courts makes a mockery of the law, before which all citizens should be equal. But the PM's disquiet is unlikely to be motivated purely by his doubtless high regard for justice or by dislike of the anti-women tenor of this and similar judgments.

Mr Cameron appears also to be using judicial excesses to strike a blow at the Human Rights Act, which is currently none too secure. A commission looking at whether it might be replaced by a British Bill of Rights – a very unwise course - is likely to kick any repeal into the long grass of the next Parliament. That, however, could change, if the public anger over a judge-made law for the rich and famous is used to discredit the Act.

The HRA defends the rights of the common man. Where it fails, the faults are not in its construction but its interpretation. By giving undue weight to privacy and too little to freedom of speech, recent judgments are skewing the law in a way likely to bring it into further disrepute.

With luck, the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, who is reviewing super-injunctions, will quickly redress the balance. A string of perverse rulings is threatening the Human Rights Act, lowering the reputation of the judiciary and raising the spectre of a new privacy law that could further repress freedom of speech. This serves the interests of no one, save those demanding – and getting – a protection they do not deserve by dint of their celebrity and cash.

Most attacks on judges are unwarranted. This one is not. The judiciary should beware the consquences of an assault on British liberty.